Matt "Mad Libs" Taibbi: It's Like [A Thing] with [Crazy Other Things]

By now, you will have tried to read Matt Taibbi’s latest, which makes the case, which in my book was already made, that there should be criminal investigations at Goldman Sachs. I say “tried” because this is rough going. (And yes: Matt Taibbi, God bless!) And he’s not wrong! Many of us have accustomed ourselves over the last few years to reading about regulatory whatnots and tranchey thingamabobs, and while it’ll always be an uncomfortable second nature, at least writing about financial instruments follows some rules. But it’s not the finance that’s hard. For one, there’s sentences like this one: “Each of the deals appears to represent a different and innovative brand of shamelessness and deceit.” Now, I’m sorry the legal department made you say “appears to,” even though it is technically accurate that we only know for sure that there is an appearance of deceit. But the helpful analogies!

Goldman isn’t a pudgy housewife who broke her diet with a few Nilla Wafers between meals — it’s an advanced-stage, 1,100-pound medical emergency who hasn’t left his apartment in six years, and is found by paramedics buried up to his eyes in cupcake wrappers and pizza boxes.

It is not at all like that.

Goldman was like a car dealership that realized it had a whole lot full of cars with faulty brakes. Instead of announcing a recall, it surged ahead with a two-fold plan to make a fortune: first, by dumping the dangerous products on other people, and second, by taking out life insurance against the fools who bought the deadly cars.

True-ish: it is indeed a little like that?

When its victims try to run out of the burning house, Goldman stands in the doorway, blasts them all with gasoline before they can escape, and then has the balls to send a bill overcharging its victims for the pleasure of getting fried.

Okay, it is really definitely not like that.

This is kind of like taking all the kids who were picked last to play volleyball in every gym class of every public school in the state, throwing them in a new gym, and pretending that the first 10 kids picked are varsity-level players. Then you take all the unpicked kids left over from that process, throw them in a gym with similar kids from all 50 states, and call the first 10 kids picked All-Americans.

It is maybe like that but now you’ve mingled sports and finance and childhood shame and I don’t knoooowww any more….